Research Projects

Freedom on the Move

The Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Center at the University of New Orleans has joined an
exciting digital humanities project with colleagues at Cornell University and the
University of Alabama called Freedom on the Move, a collaborative database of runaway slave advertisements for all of North America.

The efforts of enslaved people to escape spans the entire history of North American
slavery. From the colonial period through the Civil War, enslavers posted “runaway
ads” to try to locate these fugitives. Such ads provide significant quantities of
individual and collective information about the economic, demographic, social, and
cultural history of slavery, but they have never been systematically collected. Freedom on the Move will compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical,
geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis. Some elements of the data collection
will be crowd sourced, engendering a public sense of co-participation in the process
of recording history, and producing a living pedagogical tool for instructors at all
levels, in multiple disciplines.

Under the direction of Dr. Mary Niall Mitchell, Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Chair in New
Orleans Studies, UNO students will be collecting and cataloging advertisements from
Louisiana newspapers. Louisiana was one of the most important states in the Deep South
because of the port city of New Orleans. The collection of advertisements from New
Orleans and the region promises to expand our knowledge of antebellum slavery, including
population movements, African American culture, ethnicity, linguistics, material culture,
urban slavery, the interstate and transatlantic slave trades, the spread of cotton
and sugar cultivation, and family formation and dislocation.

New Orleans Historical

New Orleans Historical is a web and mobile platform for sharing stories and scholarship
about the history of New Orleans and the surrounding area. A project of the Midlo
Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans and the Communications
Department of Tulane University, New Orleans Historical is a free app available on
your Android or iPhone smart phone or tablet as well as on the web.

Orleans Parish School Board Project

Dr. Kennedy (center) with school board

Dr. Al Kennedy, Midlo Associate, supervises a long-term project of the Midlo Center
whose goal is to create a practical survey (or index) of material within the Orleans
Parish School Board Collection housed at the University of New Orleans. This mammoth
collection, central to the history of education and race relations in the region,
had been fairly inaccessible to researchers hindered by the extreme difficulty of
locating information among the vast materials. With creation of an index to the school
board minutes, and the placing of the index on the web, a window into the collection
is now accessible to students, faculty, researchers, and policymakers, thereby ensuring
that this priceless collection is utilized.

School board records

Three decades ago, Dr. Kennedy helped convince the school board to preserve its history
and make it available to scholars. Today, the Orleans Parish School Board Collection
documents 170 years of public education in New Orleans. The collection, exceeding
1,600 linear feet--or more than the length of five football fields—includes minutes
of meetings beginning in 1841; rare photographs of students, teachers, and school
buildings from the late 1800s; curriculum guides that span more than a century; and
annual reports, directories, school profiles, budget documents, and other sources
of information. The research team of Dr. Kennedy and history students has found no
similar collection of this size and breadth in the nation.

Dr. Al Kennedy

Working with the staff of the Louisiana and Special Collections Department at the
Earl K. Long Library, where the Orleans Parish School Board Collection (MSS 147) is
housed, the project staff of Dr. Kennedy and history students has focused on the handwritten
journals containing the non-indexed minutes of school board meetings dating back to
the 1840s. The project team's meticulous efforts have resulted in a body of work that
will enable researchers to easily search for names and topics related to education
and myriad other issues such as religion in the schools, teacher salaries, new construction,
health policies, hiring policies, gender-related, race and ethnic-related issues,
textbooks, and more. Students of education, history, urban studies, sociology, and
related disciplines have already discovered rewarding avenues for research within
the pages of the school board records.